


No Fury

by mylittleredgirl



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Domestic Violence, Episode Related, Episode: s02e16 The Long Goodbye, F/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Phoebus and Thalan aren't nice people, flashback/fantasy rape and abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:08:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27320212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylittleredgirl/pseuds/mylittleredgirl
Summary: Thalan was a soldier too. A pilot. John hopes the similarities end there.
Relationships: John Sheppard/Elizabeth Weir, Phoebus/Thalan (Stargate)
Comments: 11
Kudos: 37
Collections: Sparktober





	No Fury

**Author's Note:**

  * For [havocthecat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/havocthecat/gifts), [anr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/gifts).



*

While Phoebus is dying, Elizabeth screams.

John knows it’s someone else’s death knell, but it’s Elizabeth’s voice and Elizabeth’s body strapped down to a bed, helpless, restrained, in pain.

When Thalan died, it wasn’t like this. It hurt like hell, but only for a minute or two before John was alone. He suspects Thalan always knew Phoebus was the stronger one.

Elizabeth’s been screaming for minutes or hours or days, and he wonders if it’s Phoebus exacting her revenge. Elizabeth’s people kept her from victory, so she’ll burn her host from the inside. No matter what the medical staff keeps saying about strong vitals, it looks and sounds like Elizabeth is dying a painful death.

Five hours ago, when John was still Thalan, he would have celebrated.

*

He has a hard time looking at her after she wakes up. He doesn’t know whose feelings will come to the fore, his or the dregs Thalan left behind, and either possibility feels dangerous when he’s trying to stay in control.

When it’s her turn for Carson to fuss over her in preparation for their release, she complains of sore muscles. “I guess that’s not a surprise. I’m usually sitting across a negotiating table when I face off with a representative from an opposing side.”

 _Representatives from opposing sides_ sure is softening it a bit.

Apparently Carson agrees with him. “If you don’t mind my saying, dear, their fight seemed more personal than that.”

John has to look at her then. He catches her eye for just a moment, and knows before she speaks that they’re keeping that part a secret.

Elizabeth looks away. “War is personal, Carson.”

*

There’s structural damage control to do—during the course of their private war, he and Elizabeth shot the hell out of several key areas of the city.

As far as human damage, Ronon will recover. The security teams are fine, if bruised and giving Elizabeth a wide berth. He overhears two of Caldwell’s men saying, _I’d never mess with her, that’s for sure,_ and John feels a flash of pride before he remembers what happened to earn Elizabeth their respect.

Everyone he sees _looks_ at him for too long, like they’re waiting for a tell, bracing themselves for when he'll snap and reveal he’s not John Sheppard after all. Elizabeth’s probably getting the same treatment exaggerated tenfold, since she’s the one who locked the city down and threatened the general population. He—Thalan—had only one target in mind, but that doesn’t make John feel any less guilty.

His arm itches, and he can’t help picking at the skin around the bullet wound. Soon, there will be no evidence left anywhere except a few scattered scars.

As far as he’s concerned, that can’t come soon enough.

*

The smell of his own sweat reminds him so much of Thalan that it pulls him from sleep. He gets up twice in the night to shower.

It’s fucked up, he thinks, as he turns the heat up and scrubs his skin raw. It was less than a year ago that the Iratus bug retrovirus turned him violent and callous and inhuman, transformed him into a _thing_ that thought and felt and smelled like an entirely different form of life.

This was different. The thoughts and feelings and memories were Thalan’s, but the _sensations,_ the adrenaline, and the physical responses were all familiar. John’s body remembers it all like it was _him,_ and that’s making it so much harder to compartmentalize.

Since it happened, his sleep has been too restless for dreams to last longer than a few minutes, and he thinks that’s a blessing. It’s bad enough just recalling scattered images of Phoebus when she was blonde and square-jawed and came with her hands fisted in Thalan’s hair, or Elizabeth with a foreign snarl on her lips.

He aches to feel something of his own.

The hot rain falling from the ceiling of the Ancient shower is soothing, and John’s hand drifts to his groin. He tries to focus on nothing but sensation, follows the path of his fingers and his breath and the blood filling his erection as he strokes himself hard.

He doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to fantasize when his mind is so full of someone else’s thoughts, but on a hot rush of sensation, there she is:

_John, I want you to try._

She was already Phoebus in the infirmary, but he didn’t know that. He thought Elizabeth was taking a new step in this unnamed thing growing between them, that she was inviting him, _choosing_ him, wanting—

She’s spread out before him in his mind’s eye, beckoning. Lust surges with the next stroke of his hand, but when he thinks about touching her it comes out cruel and twisted, like Thalan’s hands are around her throat.

_Stop, stop!_ He’s screaming in his head, like he was for those hours, and the water shuts off in response, leaving John’s heart pounding and his stomach in knots. For a second he thinks he might throw up, but ultimately he just braces his back against the tile wall, like Thalan is in the shower with him and there’s not enough room.

He swears out loud, trying to speak over the ghosts.

*

Elizabeth pages him the day after they’re released from the infirmary and asks where he is. Her voice in his radio earpiece is the same as it has been for two years, unchanged, but now it makes his body tense with someone else’s vengeance.

He tells her that he’s in the B-level gym with the heavy bags, and by the time she shows up, he has steeled himself to see only her: his boss, his partner, his friend. He’s thought of hundreds of worst-case scenarios in their time in Atlantis, but before Phoebus, he never once imagined Elizabeth holding a gun to his head.

“We need to go to lunch,” she says. It doesn’t sound like an invitation so much as an order. “In the mess hall.”

It’s the busiest mess time, full of people between shifts. Elizabeth rarely eats anywhere but at her desk. She probably wouldn’t eat lunch at all if John hadn’t stuck a recurring reminder into her calendar one day when she looked too pale and thin and he was feeling protective in a way he couldn’t manage to express out loud.

In this case, he understands why she’s making an exception. Their people need to see them. Together, not killing each other. The only person he really wanted to hurt was Elizabeth, and now, she’s the only one who’s not afraid of him.

They shared a fucked up, intimate experience, and it’s pulling him toward her as much as he wants to push her away.

John starts gathering up his stuff, shoves them into his gym bag with unnecessary force, like he can store his conflicted feelings in there, too. “Let me shower. I’ll meet you there in ten.”

“Should you really be working out like this?” Elizabeth indicates his upper arm, where blood from his aggravated wound has seeped through the bandage.

He needs to. He’s not sure she can understand. She’s probably better able to separate herself from Phoebus because, from what he saw, there isn’t a single common trait between them.

Thalan was a soldier, too. A pilot. John hopes the similarities end there.

He shrugs, self-conscious of the blood on his arm, the blood on his knuckles, the sweat soaking his clothes. “I think I’ve got some anger to work out.”

Elizabeth shoves her hands in her pockets, looks down at the floor. Violence has always made her uncomfortable. He can’t imagine how she felt with her finger on the button, threatening to wipe out the very people she’s meant to protect. “Don’t we all.”

*

The mess hall hushes into a low murmur when they arrive, and the whispering continues as they eat.

They talk about the dumbest possible things—missions they’ve already debriefed, training schedules they’ve already finalized, even the new media box the _Daedalus_ brought with them on this trip. She never has time for movies, but she pretends to care.

She asks, “Did they bring new football games?”

“No football now—that’s in the fall.” Football is the only reason he even keeps track of Earth seasons anymore.

She nods. “I still owe you a game from last year. I haven’t forgotten.”

For a moment, the heaviness lifts. “Neither have I.”

She promised to watch a game with him because he wore her down. She was in a good mood and he was teasing her, blaming her for the five-hour atonal opera they all sat through on Talvus, telling her the _least_ she could do was repay him with a few hours of _civilized entertainment,_ She agreed with a mischievous, tempting smile, and he felt that tickle of excitement he gets when she seeks his company for something that isn’t work related, something for just the two of them.

Elizabeth raises an eyebrow, lips twitching like she’s keeping in that same smile. He can picture her next to him on a couch in that out-of-the-way media lounge, complaining about how much time they’re wasting and sitting so close that he could put his arm around her, if he were brave enough.

“Just _one_ game, and you’d better not check the score first.” She leans a little closer to wag a finger at him. “No cheating.”

He looks away. He wants to tell her to stop flirting with him, but that would put a name on this _thing_ they’ve never acknowledged. He usually dismisses it as a harmless mutual crush, but with a madman’s dying breath reverberating in his skull, nothing feels harmless.

She frowns. “John?” Her hand inches toward his on the table before she pulls it back behind her tray. Even the fleeting urge to pursue her hand with his feels dangerous. “Are you okay?”

The mood has shifted, all levity gone. He swallows everything he shouldn’t feel. “We’re both alive. That’s what matters, right?”

She pales and looks around them at everyone Phoebus wasn’t able to kill. “Given what she almost did... it might have been better if Thalan succeeded.”

John puts his coffee mug down on the table harder than he intends. Both he and Elizabeth jump at the slam. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“I’m not saying I wish I were dead. I just meant...”

“Can we not talk about this?”

Thalan would have killed her if he’d managed to get her unarmed and helpless, but it wouldn’t have been the first thing he did. He got hard in John’s body at the thought of tearing Elizabeth’s uniform, forcing her while she struggled and screamed.

He’ll never tell Elizabeth that. She has enough fodder for her nightmares already, and John doesn’t think he could say it aloud.

It’s over. She’s fine, he’s fine, no one died.

That should be enough.

*

His dreams are still violent and disjointed, full of dead people he never met, the bold red sky of an unfamiliar world, Thalan striking Elizabeth with John’s hands.

The memories are fading with the alien gone, leaving John’s subconscious to fill in the gaps with pieces of himself. Phoebus and Elizabeth blend together; the places he imagines are unfamiliar, but it’s Elizabeth’s body, her smile, her mouth calling him _husband._

And it’s him underneath her, drinking up Phoebus’ stubborn strength, her arrogance, her _ignorance._ She spits hate for his people all day as she trains as a soldier and swallows her planet’s propaganda, and Thalan collects intelligence while he fucks her in her own home, her own bed. She doesn’t know he’s the enemy, and that turns him on so much more than her body or her dark smile or the way she begs.

Phoebus and Thalan were well-matched, in many ways, their relationship fraught and violent even before she knew who he was. Phoebus mounts him and shouts victory in Elizabeth’s voice, and John bides his time until she’s limp and sore, at her most vulnerable. He plows into her body with a brutal force, because Thalan could only come when she was in pain.

John wakes to his alarm with blood in his mouth where he bit his own lip, sheets dirty, body shaking.

Breakfast with Elizabeth is first on his schedule, part of her mess hall visibility campaign, but he can’t face her.

*

He crosses paths with Caldwell in the hall outside Heightmeyer’s office. They acknowledge each other with a nod and don’t mention why either of them might be there. Beckett’s been ordering an awful lot of psych referrals lately.

To Heightmeyer, though, John jokes, “Developing a specialty practice for victims of alien hijacking?”

“I’m thinking of starting a support group. Have a seat, Colonel.”

John’s not a big fan of hashing out his feelings, and that hasn’t changed even though the feelings in question are technically someone else’s. He keeps the conversation focused on the practical: leadership, team-building, getting this whole fucking thing over with.

“You and Doctor Weir are doing the right thing,” Heightmeyer assures him. “Being seen together going about your normal routine will help remind people that the danger has passed. Most people understand that this was an isolated incident.”

“Most people.” Not that John blames them. He still bites back the urge to check his sidearm whenever Caldwell walks by. If Cadman’s temporary time-share in McKay’s brain counts, the entire Atlantis command team has been body-snatched in the last year. That’s got to weaken people’s faith in their leadership. “I guess there’s no established timetable for getting over these things.”

It’s not until Heightmeyer speaks that John realizes he gave her an opening into something more personal. “What lingering effects are you experiencing?”

“Nothing.”

Heightmeyer raises an eyebrow, and repeats: “Nothing.”

_Well,_ he thinks, _I can’t have sexual fantasies about my boss anymore without feeling like a rapist—how’s that for lingering effects?_

Aloud, he says, “It’s over. Beckett says it’s over.”

“I see.”

John wonders what lingering effects Elizabeth’s been dealing with. How honest she’s been with Heightmeyer. If she can’t sleep either, can’t stand being trapped in her own mind, her own skin.

The silence drags on until he finally admits, “Some weird dreams. That’s it.”

“It would be understandable if you were hurt, or afraid, or angry. You were violated.”

“Yeah, well, I should have known better.” Out of all of them—Caldwell, McKay, Elizabeth—John is the only one who had a choice. He _knew_ it was a bad, dangerous idea. None of them knew the full extent of it, but he knew Elizabeth was being influenced. She had an alien consciousness in her head; it shouldn’t have mattered how sweetly she asked, how tempting she made it sound.

Now that he knows the truth, he can picture Elizabeth trapped inside herself, silently screaming at him not to let it happen, not to fall for such an obvious trap, not to be so _stupid._ It was right there in front of him, but he couldn’t see past her smile, luring him in against her will.

“I could have said no.”

“Why didn’t you?”

He didn’t want anyone else touching her. He didn’t want to stand guard and watch someone else play her husband, watch her smile like that at another man, watch—

He couldn’t trust her safety to anyone but himself, and look how that turned out.

John grinds his jaw. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Someone else would have done it.”

Heightmeyer sets her notepad down on the end table next to her. John can’t see what’s on it. “If it would’ve happened regardless of your answer, maybe you should consider that you’re not to blame.”

“I’m not blaming myself. Alien consciousness, remember?”

Heightmeyer looks like she doesn’t believe him.

*

The first meeting of the Society for Those Who’ve Recently Tried to Kill Their Colleagues While Under Alien Influence comes to order. Elizabeth and Caldwell are calling it a command briefing.

They waste some time discussing inventories and budgets and the personnel changes that will take place after the _Daedalus’s_ next Earth run, but eventually they have to talk about it.

“I had Doctor Heightmeyer reach out to the department heads to get a read on how the civilian members of the expedition are responding,” Elizabeth says. “You may want to have her do the same with the military contingent—on Atlantis and on the _Daedalus._ Without naming names, she said there are a number of concerns that the effects of our...” She trails off. Everyone at the table knows where that thought is going.

Caldwell finishes it anyway: “... that you might still be vulnerable to alien influence.”

Elizabeth gives him a stern look. “That _we_ might be.”

John wishes he could be angrier about his people doubting him, but there are moments when _he’s_ not entirely sure of himself. Thalan’s gone, but he doesn’t feel normal. “So should we expect a mutiny?”

“No, just concerns, fueled mostly by rumor.” Elizabeth sighs. “Kate recommends we combat hearsay with facts and release the full reports on the incident on the open server.”

“No way. No. That’s insane.” John has been hoping for a way to lose the day’s worth of security tapes into the ocean, never mind having them aired at the next movie night. “No _way.”_

Caldwell’s argument is a little more coherent. “I agree with Sheppard. Revealing how close any one of us came to destroying the city isn’t going to boost morale. Besides, I’d rather not have the details of how to use Atlantis’s life support system as a weapon become common knowledge.”

Elizabeth pales, and John feels a hot urge to rise up and defend her, even though Caldwell is right. It’s the same kind of blind emotion that got him into this mess in the first place, like his every response is just a little too _much_ when it comes to Elizabeth.

He manages to say, with relative calm: “Have Beckett release the medical details. If anyone wants to spend a few hours comparing EEG readings, they can be my guest.”

Caldwell nods. “Fine.”

Elizabeth takes a breath. “There’s one more thing on this topic.” She turns her tablet computer around to face them. There are six Stargate symbols across the screen that shouldn’t be familiar.

“Kalau,” John breathes out. Apprehension crawls up his spine, and he doesn’t know whose it is.

Caldwell looks between them. When neither of them explain, he prompts: “What?”

“It’s Phoebus’s planet,” Elizabeth says. “Or, at least, it was. Doctor Zelenka has been examining the pods, and the design is clearly distinct from the Ancients or the Wraith. There could be valuable technology there.”

Thalan killed eighteen people on his way off that planet, including his father-in-law. John’s not eager to retrace his steps. “There could also still be _people_ there.”

“If that’s the case,” Caldwell points out, “you’ll be bringing home the ashes of a war hero.”

*

The sky burns above them, red and orange and pink, Phoebus’s skin a milky white as she rises naked from the water–

—fifty of his people dead after a successful raid, Kalau citizens celebrating in the street outside, and Thalan tears off Phoebus’s ugly green junior-officer’s uniform, throws her down on the ground so hard the sound echoes. He’s going to _make her pay—_

—she looks like Elizabeth, and one of his hands is tight over her mouth, the other down her pants as he shoves her against a metal Atlantis wall, somewhere dark and—

—kisses her in the lab in front of everyone, and no one knows that Thalan is gone and he’s only John. Elizabeth is still trapped under alien control and can’t speak, but John doesn’t care as long as no one makes him _stop—_

He jerks awake with a gasp and scrambles out of bed before another dream can pull him under. He stands there in the dark for long minutes, freaked out and turned on and _angry._

Thalan _stole_ something from him, more than his body.

Elizabeth is special, beyond their shared command and that hum of physical attraction that is always beneath the surface of their interactions. He trusts her. She believes in him. She makes him feel like a _good man._ He cares about her in a way that’s starting to feel serious, and even though they’re colleagues, even though he won’t act on it while they’re in the middle of a war—sometimes, in quiet moments, he looks at her...

No matter what happens in the future—if anything ever does—this will always be the way he first kissed her: cold and hateful, under pretense, trapped within his own body and screaming.

He doubts he’ll get another chance.

*

“Why do you think Phoebus chose you?”

“Shouldn’t you ask her that?” John clears his throat and corrects: “—ask Elizabeth that?”

Heightmeyer’s lips twitch up in a brief smile. “According to my calendar, this is your session.”

He feels itchy, and crosses his arms to keep from scratching. “She didn’t have a lot of options.”

Rodney would have run screaming at the thought of sharing his brain again. Carson would have insisted on supervising the procedure instead. Caldwell just got back from having a Goa’uld scraped out of his brain.

Heightmeyer tilts her head. “There are a lot of people in this city. Most of them would have been easier to kill.”

“She didn’t just want to kill someone. She wanted to kill _him.”_

“I see.”

He really doesn’t like where this is going. He has already accepted that Phoebus used Elizabeth’s knowledge to manipulate him, and she didn’t have to try very hard. It’s embarrassing, but he’d rather admit to being an easy mark than consider the possibility that something else factored into her decision. Elizabeth reads people—it’s how she negotiates, how she leads. He’s not sure he can live with it if Phoebus thumbed through Elizabeth’s mental rolodex of everyone in the expedition and chose him because he _reminded_ her of Thalan.

“She wanted a challenge,” John says out loud. “She wouldn’t have been satisfied with anything less.” That part’s true, at least. Phoebus liked a good fight. The memories of Thalan’s life that come in daylight are usually half-formed and shapeless, but he clearly remembers that the first time Thalan hit her, she punched him right back and left a scar.

And then they _fucked,_ both still bleeding, hatred burning into a kind of white-hot passion John has never experienced in real life, and by the end of it Phoebus was laughing through a split lip, and Thalan felt genuine affection for this woman he couldn’t break. Those rare soft moments make it all the harder to box this experience up and throw it away.

“Colonel,” Kate says, her voice shaking him out of the memory he doesn’t want to have in the first place. “Where did you go just now?”

He just wants to _forget._ “Doc, I don’t think this therapy thing is working.”

“It usually works better if you let it.”

He’s not sure whose anger he’s feeling, but he leans into it. Anger is easy—it blocks out everything else. “Fine. Fine.” He stands up, fists clenching. “You’re the expert, so how am I supposed to fix this? What am I not doing that I should be doing?”

“There is no ‘fixing it.’”

“Then what’s the _point?”_ He’s yelling, and he isn’t even sorry about it.

“The point, Colonel, is to integrate this into the rest of your experiences so it no longer affects your daily life.”

“I don’t want to ‘integrate’ it. I want him _gone.”_ He turns away from her for a moment to collect himself, covering the action by walking over to the window like there’s something interesting outside he needs to see. After a few cooling breaths, he walks back. “Thalan and Phoebus are dead. This should be over.”

Heightmeyer’s face is full of compassion. “You can’t just put it on a shelf. You have to move through it. Sometimes that means it gets worse before it gets better.”

He’s put a lot of things on that shelf, though, with greater success. “This isn’t even close to the worst thing I’ve been through.” He’s been in her office for some of them, too, because Carson or Elizabeth ordered him to, and in the past he’s always managed to say the right thing, share exactly the right amount to earn a check mark on his file without a follow-up appointment.

Heightmeyer asks, “So what makes this different?”

Elizabeth, collapsing in his arms. Elizabeth, smiling at him in the infirmary, asking him to join her. Elizabeth, firing a gun at him, and him firing back.

Elizabeth, kissing him, and it meant nothing except that he failed to protect her, that the situation was dangerously out of his control, that an alien wanted to kill her with John’s bare hands.

John sinks back to the couch, sags against the cushions. He covers his eyes. “I don’t know.”

*

Normally, he likes seeing Elizabeth geared up for off-world travel. She’s cute, dressed up in a tac vest, trying to hide her excitement, and he—well, he likes to show off, a little. She gets to see his team in action, instead of just reading about it after the fact. She gets to see him, being a leader. He takes charge in a different way when she’s there—and he pointedly ignores that little knowing smirk on Teyla’s face as she watches him do it.

Elizabeth follows his lead off-world, and from the cheerful way she’ll ask for instructions, he thinks she enjoys the role reversal, too.

This time, though, there’s nothing cute in her expression. She’s standing ramrod straight, like she’s steeling herself against what’s on the other side. John has seen that determined look on Elizabeth’s face before, lots of times, so there’s no reason it should remind him of anyone else.

“You sure you’re up for this?” he asks. Somehow his question startles her, making her gasp, and his grip tightens on his P90 like the danger is real.

“I’m fine.”

The MALP showed no signs of life on the other side of the Kalau Stargate, but there are always dangers in an abandoned war zone, and Thalan’s feelings about the place have him on high alert. “Let my team go first, look around. Make sure there are no booby traps.”

“All the more reason I should be there.”

“Yeah. Okay.” He doesn’t like it, but there’s no arguing that she’s the one most likely to spot potential danger. “This is—”

“Creepy?”

He was going to say something a little stronger, but, “Yeah. I keep thinking…”

He trails off, not sure what to say, what he _should_ say. Heightmeyer told him that he and Elizabeth should talk about it. He assumes she told Elizabeth the same thing. Neither of them have been willing to start a real conversation.

“I know,” Elizabeth says, lifting a hand toward him. She lets it drop back to her side before making contact. “Me too.”

This is almost enough, a shared acknowledgment that they’re about to step into someone else’s past. He can remember three separate dreams from last night, and in all of them, Elizabeth rematerialized on the other side of the Stargate as Phoebus, blonde and ruthless.

“Dial the Stargate,” she orders, and he braces himself.

*

The grainy MALP footage didn’t show very much, and it isn’t until John steps through the Stargate that he realizes that’s because there’s basically nothing to see. John recognizes only the colors: the orange-red of the ground, the pink tinge of the sky, the yellow of thick, spiny cactus-shrubs. Without the network of irrigation pumps and channels that ran when the planet was inhabited, the patches of vegetation are few and far between.

It’s eerily quiet, outside of the sounds of his team moving behind him, and the air smells different without burning fuel. The buildings have crumbled down to the occasional stone wall, duned up with sand. There’s no wind, as still as if they’re indoors, and it only adds to the feeling that the whole planet is a tomb.

Ronon says, “This looks like a waste of time.”

“They kept many of their critical facilities underground,” Elizabeth says. “Weapons stockpiles. Laboratories. Primary education.”

That sparks a memory: Thalan, frustrated at the distraction of children reciting educational rhymes, as though that were the only disturbing thing about having a kindergarten three hundred feet from a hangar full of explosive warheads.

Without familiar landmarks, his piecemeal memories aren’t helping him pick a direction to go. He turns to Elizabeth. “Do you recognize anything?”

She nods, slowly. “There were defense towers. Here, and here. The cliffs are that way.” She points ahead and to her right, two o’clock. “Which means the shipyards…”

She closes her eyes, and he can see movement through her eyelids, like she’s retracing Phoebus’s steps. John’s stomach is in knots as his mind flashes through unhelpful memories: the ceremonial crack of a clay wedding pot on hard ground that sounded to Thalan like bone snapping, Kalau trainees chanting words John can’t remember, Phoebus asleep and vulnerable with her chest bared, the look on her father’s face when Thalan put a knife between his ribs.

“That way.” Elizabeth’s eyes are still closed as she indicates the direction. “Maybe two kilometers. There was an R&D lab underneath, but—” Her eyes fly open. “Pressure mines. Dozens of them. There’s a safe route, but…” The stress lines on her face make John’s chest hurt. “I can’t remember it. I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, no offense,” Rodney says, “but even if you did, I’d trust our scanners over some dead woman’s memories.”

She exhales, sounding relieved. “Good.”

*

There’s not much left in the underground structure. John and Ronon do a little exploring and find a few skeletons and a research lab that might be, in Rodney’s words, “mildly useful,” but no ships. Between cave-ins and the wreckage from Kalau’s last stand, whatever may have been there is mostly too damaged to be identified, let alone salvageable.

John doesn’t remember the place, at least not consciously. If it weren’t for the occasional sign bearing Kalau symbols, it could be any long-decayed bunker. That’s not doing a lot to soothe his nervous system, though. The hair on the back of his neck has been standing on end since he came through the Stargate.

When they head back to check in, it’s just Rodney, who jerks his thumb toward the exit stairs. “Elizabeth wanted a ‘moment,’” he says, distracted.

“Okay.” John settles in to wait.

Ronon smacks him.

He glares and rubs his arm, where his bullet scar is just about healed. “Yeah, yeah, I’m going.” 

*

Elizabeth is back-lit against the late afternoon sun, sitting with her elbows resting on her knees, chin on her hands, looking out at the silent remains of Phoebus’s civilization.

“I got it,” John says to Teyla. Elizabeth turns her head at the sound of his voice, but doesn’t acknowledge him.

Something’s missing in her expression, and it takes him a moment to place it. She always has a little twitch of her lips whenever she sees him, her way of welcoming him into whatever conversation they’re about to have. _It’s good to see you,_ or: _We’re on the same side._ It’s a given part of the background noise of his life that he’s never been consciously aware of, until now. Its absence leaves him unsettled—as if he weren’t already.

The creaking metal sounds of Teyla closing the bunker door tells him they’re now alone.

“So this is the end of the war,” John says.

She’s sitting on what’s left of a wall, and she scoots over in invitation. It’s only after he sits down that he notices the container at her feet.

An urn, he realizes, remembering Caldwell’s quip about a war hero. After everything Phoebus did to her, Elizabeth still wanted to bring her home.

That’s what John would have done, too, on Earth, when his enemy stood on the other side of a gun barrel or a plane or a bomb. Out here, with all he has experienced, he doubts he’d make the same consideration. He’s put no thought at all into what should become of Thalan’s remains.

It’s practical, because their enemies are light-years away with no formal diplomatic ties—or long dead, as the case may be. He hopes that’s the only reason for his change in perspective, because he doesn’t want to consider how the Pegasus galaxy might be eroding parts of his conscience, edging him closer to people like Phoebus and Thalan.

“She had a child,” Elizabeth says, and John turns to her in surprise. “I don’t… I don’t think it was his.”

It’s the first time either of them has acknowledged out loud that Phoebus and Thalan were anything other than enemies. “Not exactly mother of the year material.”

“No, not exactly.”

It feels like his turn, like he should share something personal Phoebus wouldn’t have known. “He thought about defecting.”

“For her?”

“Yeah.” They’re sitting so close, and John wants to bury himself in the parts of her that are kind and forgiving and _good._ He wonders if he’s rewriting history, if the moments of longing he remembers were ever Thalan’s, or only his. “Not often. He was pretty determined to be an asshole.”

She chuckles with some genuine humor, and that lets him breathe a little easier. “Thank you,” she says, and rests her hand on his knee. “I hoped coming here would feel like closure. Like it’ll get her out of my head, once and for all. Since it happened, I can’t—I can’t stop thinking about what could have happened. To Atlantis. To you.”

“You shouldn’t do that. It’ll drive you crazy.”

“You’re not thinking about it?”

He feels that itchiness he gets whenever things get personal, a sudden need to fly something or go for a three-mile run. “I said you shouldn’t. Not that I’ve figured out how.”

“I couldn’t live with myself.”

The image flashes in his mind again, Thalan holding her down while she screams, and it never happened, not when it was Elizabeth, not when it was _him,_ but it’s so vivid that he can’t—

“John. Hey.” She squeezes her hand on his leg, the dig of her nails through cloth bringing him back to the present. “Stay here with me.”

He lets out a breath, slowly, and considers that maybe she’s the one person he doesn’t need to hide this from. “I’m sorry,” he finally says. “In the infirmary—I know you better than that. I don’t know why I agreed to it.”

She tilts her head, considering him. “Don’t you?”

He feels himself flush. “Elizabeth—” It sounds like all the dust of this dead planet is lodged in his throat.

“I don’t mean to put you on the spot, John.” She draws her hand away from him, knotting her fingers together. “She knew you wouldn’t say no. Which means _I_ knew you wouldn’t say no, and I’ve been thinking about that.”

“Yeah.” He scuffs his toe against the ground. “I guess I’m not as mysterious as I hoped.”

She gives him a lopsided smile. “It’s part of your charm.”

He looks at the indent his boot left in the sand. An imprint, so to speak—a word he’ll probably never use lightly again. It looks like something permanent, in the dead stillness of the air, but eventually a breeze will fill in all the footprints they’ve made today.

He taps the urn with his foot. “Do you want help? Finding somewhere to put that?”

“Yes,” she says. “I do.”

*

They walk to the edge of a cliff. With the exception of his radio check-ins to his team, they do it in silence.

“They used to jump off here, as children.”

John looks down at the shoals far below. Unlike the orange sand around them, the rocks below are a stark white, like bones. “With parachutes, I hope.”

“Of course. I think it was their equivalent of throwing kids off a dock so they learn they can swim. They wanted them to… greet death, and walk away from it.” She shakes her head. “It’s hard to believe, in a galaxy full of Wraith, these people would fight a war on top of that.”

“We have plenty of ways to die on Earth.”

She chuckles. “So we do.”

“So what now?”

She looks down at the urn in her hands, and closes her eyes. Her lips move, like she’s speaking a silent prayer. John tries for a moment to get into the spirit of it, to wish peace on an enemy who can no longer physically harm him, but can’t bring himself to think of a blessing any kinder than _good riddance._

Elizabeth looks up at him, and something less than tranquil passes over her face. He expects her to open the container and spread the ashes, but she drops the entire box off the cliff—like a Kalau child making a polite acquaintance with their own mortality, apparently.

The container breaks open at the base, too far away to hear the sound, but John imagines it like the crack of a wedding pot, thousands of years ago.

“Kalau tradition?” he asks. Elizabeth shrugs, and he thinks that maybe she doesn’t want to carry anything home.

He brushes the back of her knuckles with his. It goes against all his instincts—as a soldier, because they’re in uncertain territory and it’s safer with both his hands free. As a man who wants something he knows he can’t have.

She hesitates almost long enough for him to pull away, but then takes his hand and holds it, strong and reassuring and warm. She’s alive, and Phoebus is not.

“Thank God it’s over,” she says, taking deep breaths.

He envies her exhales, like she’s releasing all her tension with it. “Closure?”

“Mine, anyway,” she says. She’s perceptive, as always—part of what got them into this mess in the first place. “What about you?”

He turns to face her, away from the expanse beyond the cliffs and the white rocks below, and hopes an answer will come to him before the silence stretches too long. In the empty space, he can think of only one thing, and from the dawning comprehension on her face, she knows what it is.

He asks, “Are you okay with this?”

She nods, and lets go of his hand. He brackets her face in his palms and looks in her eyes for a long moment to prove to himself that it’s only her.

When he kisses her, he feels nothing.

No release, no freedom from guilt, no—

He draws back, frustrated and disappointed, and then her fingers slide through his hair, pulling him back in.

He opens his mouth, more in surprise than anything else, and then her tongue touches his and all thought leaves him in the hot reality of her. He’s dizzy with the sudden intensity of it, with how she presses herself along the length of his body, with how there’s no anger, no opposition, only her mouth on his and her hand sliding up under the back of his vest to grip at his shirt.

He wants, God, he _wants,_ and it’s all his.

When she lets him go, it’s with a soft caress of his cheek. When he opens his eyes, she’s smiling at him.

“Better?”

He might be an open book to her, but she’ll probably never stop surprising him. “I’m not thinking about Thalan anymore, that’s for sure.”

She grins. “That was the idea.” Her expression sobers, but still with a gentleness he craves. “We can’t, you know. But it’s not because I don’t want to.”

Somehow, it’s the perfect thing to say. He wants to make an overture for the future, tell her he’ll ask her out for a drink when the war’s over, but for however many moments it can last, he wants to pretend there is no war—not the one that happened on this planet, not the war they’re fighting now. _They’re_ on the same side again, and that’s what’s important.

“You still owe me a football game,” he says instead.

She laughs, full and wonderful. “I do at that.”

“Ready to go?”

He feels the echo of her hand in his, drowning out all other echoes around them, and they walk back to the Stargate together.

*

**Author's Note:**

> One of the cardinal rules of Sheppard/Weir fandom is that you can never have too many “The Long Goodbye” fics. Inspired by a line in havocthecat’s [Whisper To Their Souls To Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6253) and a giant post-it note anr left on my living room wall in 2012.
> 
> Thanks to GrammarGeek for looking it over!


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